Think back to your elementary school math classes. Were you told to think of a greater-than sign as Pac-Man or to cross-multiply when dividing fractions? You weren’t alone. Tricks to help kids get the right answers to difficult problems have long been a staple of American math education.

But if Common Core supporters have their way, shortcuts like these will soon disappear from the nation’s classrooms.

In the age of Common Core, getting the right answer to a math problem is only step one. The Common Core math standards, which are in place in more than 40 states, say that it is just as important for students to understand the mathematical principles at work in a problem.

This emphasis on principles poses a problem for popular techniques like Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally, a mnemonic device for remembering the order of operations that teachers complain is imprecise, and the butterfly method for adding and subtracting fractions. If correctly applied, the tricks always result in the correct answer, but math experts say they allow students to skip the sort of conceptual thinking the standards are trying to encourage in students.

Stacey Jacobson-Francis works on math homework with her 6 year old daughter Luci Wednesday, May 14, 2014, at their home in Berkeley, Calif. As schools around the U.S. implement national Common Core learning standards, parents trying to help their kids with math homework say that adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing has become as complicated as calculus. Stacey Jacobson-Francis, 41, of Berkeley, California, said her daughter’s homework requires her to know four different ways to add. “That is way too much to ask of a first grader. She can’t remember them all, and I don’t know them all, so we just do the best that we can,” she said. (AP Photo) Photo: AP photo

Linda Gojak, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, is waging a war against the old advice that students should cross off zeros when dividing, for example. Using this technique students can quickly solve a problem like 4000 divided by 100 by eliminating two zeroes from each number and simplifying the problem to 40 divided by 1.

“I get teachers that get mad when I tell them they should stop,” said Gojak. “But I envision students dragging in a big bag of tricks into standardized tests and not really thinking about the questions.”

“It is your justification that makes your answer right or wrong,” Gojak added.

Critics, including parents who remember the way they learned math in school, worry the standards are throwing out proven computational techniques in favor of overly complex methods. They say new, convoluted approaches are turning kids off of math.

But Phil Daro, one of the lead writers of Common Core math, says math tricks have already tarnished the math brand for countless students.

“Take the butterfly method. It doesn’t articulate any mathematics,” said Daro at a conference of the Association of Mathematics Teachers of New Jersey last month. “Nothing in school is perceived to be useful by the kids, but in math they are going farther and saying, ‘why are we even doing this?’”

Steve Leinwand, principal researcher at the American Institutes for Research’s education program, also argues that America’s math teachers should embrace the shift away from right answers.

“Common Core has the audacity to use the word understand 218 times,” said Leinwand.

Daro does see some limited room for shortcuts in math.

“Now students have to arrive at a grade level way of thinking about the problem,” said Daro. “You can spend the first two-thirds of a lesson letting kids use the varied ways of thinking but for the last one-third we need to get them to the standards’ way of thinking.”

As for the tricks, Daro says, “I’d only settle for something like [the butterfly method], some days for some kids.”

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Love the emphasis on thinking and many ways to reach an answer.

- from Karen, Aug 24, 2017

Wow..."Steve Leinwand, principal researcher at the American Institutes for Research’s education program, also argues that America’s math teachers should embrace the shift away from right answers."

So incorrect answers are fine if you understand how you got the wrong answer? We put a man on the moon and did other great things with our math back in the day. And when mathematicians from Stanford feel compelled to write a paper on how Common Core isn't even close to what was proposed originally for math, there is something seriously wrong.

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